British police defend ‘anti-terror photo campaign’

I mentioned Britain’s love with extreme surveillance before (see this story), which turns every citizen into a would-be criminal. If you decide to spend your vacation in London, say, you’ll find it next to impossible to miss the ubiquitous surveillance cameras, installed, as the story goes, to prevent crime (an almost unprovable and thus politically very useful assertion). And indeed the cameras are extremely useful to identify suspects in those very crimes they didn’t deter in the first place.

But now, British police is going a step further: “Last week police chiefs issued fresh warnings over the potential dangers posed by people carrying cameras for surveillance purposes.” (see this story) So not only is everybody a possible suspect, in essence anybody carrying a camera is now a possible terrorist! And you really have to take in their Orwellian poster!

As an afterthought, on the plus side this all might save us from “Parking Spaces 2 (The British Islands)”. Just kidding, just kidding. After all, if you want to spend 130 bucks on a book with photos of empty parking spots so that you can study “issues of globalisation - the desire for a precious parking space being a banal unifier of the middle classes the world over” who am I to argue that’s not money well spent?